AT LARGE
A novel by Rex Bromfield
Copyright © 2010 Rex Bromfield
Smashwords Edition
1
Leaving Paradise
Ed Miller stood at the big window of the Las Americas International Airport and stared at the imposing black nose of the Sunwing Airlines 737 that would take him back to Toronto, far to the north. He didn’t really want to go; he had to. Beyond the runway and just out of sight over the horizon lay the only real home he’d ever known, the idyllic beach village of Punta Cana. All he wanted to do was get back here, and he hadn’t even left yet.
Again he questioned his decision. Life in the Dominican Republic had been perfect, but since his father’s untimely death, Ed had managed to lose everything that had been bequeathed to him: the business, what little working capital there was -- and now he’d even been cut off by his estranged mother without a single word of explanation. All he had left was a few loud Hawaiian shirts, some Bermuda shorts and a few other odds and ends, all of which he carried with him in two ragged suitcases.
He’d spent what was left on his last two credit cards to buy this cut-rate airline ticket to return to his mom and his place of birth -- on bended knee if necessary -- for one last infusion of cash, one last chance. He would throw himself upon her merciful soul, admit that at thirty-four he had failed at life, failed at everything. Once a buff beach bum cavorting in the white sands of Punta Cana, Ed had become an overweight, lazy, flabby, weak excuse for a man... no, he wouldn’t say all that -- just the part about being broke. She was his mom after all and besides, from what he remembered, she was no Jane Fonda herself.
2
A Death in the Family
It had been so long since Ed had been off the island that he’d forgotten how small the toilets were on planes. It wasn’t getting into the tiny space that was so tricky, it was retrieving his shirt buttons from the floor after they had all been scraped off by the door as he struggled to squeeze inside and close it. “Why the hell don’t they take real people into account when they build these damned things?” he said out loud and thought he heard flight attendants giggling outside. Okay, so he may have put on a pound or two since he’d been on the island but this was ridiculous. He had to pee standing up. Ed had taken to peeing sitting down. Standing, he could no longer eye ball the target nor the weapon. He wasn’t aware of when this transition had taken place.
Luckily there were plenty of paper towels available to wipe down the bulkhead. He threw them into the toilet in defiance of the “PLEASE DO NOT PLACE TOWELS IN TOILET” sign, then worked his way out of the coffin-sized facility.
Ed didn’t watch the in-flight movie. Instead he thought back across his life. How had he come to this point? Ed wasn’t the sort of guy who ever really thought much about important things like life, so he wasn’t very good at it. His existence had never been particularly demanding. A mediocre student at a suburban high school, he excelled at schoolyard social politics, double-talking and joking his way out of frequent academic failures. He was a cute amiable kid who managed to attract the attentions of some of the prettier girls for a while, until they found out that his self-deprecating humor was contrived to get them in the sack.
Ed’s adolescence was full of borrowed Harleys, rented Hummers, and one particularly sexy little souped-up yellow Honda Accord that he actually owned until he smashed it up showing off at high speed through rush-hour traffic. Good thing he managed by sheer luck to avoid the three people waiting at the bus stop.
His Dad, Sid, got him out of that one. Ed didn’t know exactly how but always, somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew he owed him for that. Ed and Sid were pals, so as soon as the divorce was finalized Sid took off to the islands away from the harsh Canadian winters and Ed went with him.
In the Dominican Republic, in nothing more than a shack on the beach, Ed’s Dad brought his sharp business sense into play and opened Sid’s Cabana on the Beach.
Sid had done his homework. There wasn’t a decent cheap bar and eatery for miles in either direction along the beach. The two hotels nearby had stuffy restaurants that served mediocre fare, so Sid put a big gaudy sign on the roof of his cabana, cranked up the music and served huge portions undercutting the competition’s prices by twenty percent.
“Sid’s Cabana on the Beach” was a shabby little affair, but it was an instant success. The only thing that marred this perfect situation -- and what caused Sid’s sudden demise -- was his alcoholism. When Ed was just ten his mother Lydia told him, as if it were something he didn’t already know, that his Dad was a bad alcoholic. But even at that early age Ed knew she was wrong. He was actually quite a good alcoholic. He drank almost constantly during his waking hours and seemed to hold it well as long as there were others around. But, when the party was over, there were unpredictable outbursts of outrageous behavior and frequent memory lapses. How many times had Ed had to struggle to drag him to bed or leave him to sleep it off wherever he had passed out?
Ed was the bad alcoholic. He hardly ever took more than one drink, and rarely finished that one. He had managed not to inherit the gene sequence that led to his dad’s unfortunate propensity. As a result Ed was able to savor a good glass of Medoc and a rare steak done to a turn with a steaming baked potato slathered in butter and sour cream, finished with a double cut of his favorite freshly-baked blueberry pie with vanilla ice cream. Throwing up and falling down never came into it.
When Ed first hit the Dominican Republic he was in pretty reasonable shape. He was very white in a bathing suit, especially in a population of mainly black folks. But he pulled it off because he was sort of handsome and many of the local girls took to his jovial laid-back manner.
Now, after almost fifteen years of Caribbean cuisine and little or no exercise, his weight fluctuated around two-seventy. It wasn’t a bad two-seventy but it was two-seventy just the same.
Ed worked the day shift, when the tourist traffic was lower. But the place really swung into action when Sid breezed in around four-thirty to get the party rolling. Ed had no problem with this arrangement, but secretly he wished he were more like his Dad. He was impressed with the way this man could hold his own with a group of Wall Street heavyweights then cross the room and liven up a gathering of dockworkers. Sid thrived in his little underworld. Ed saw the slight winks and nods that signaled secret arrangements he had with the Chief of Police, the neighborhood strongmen and even a few known Santo Domingo felons and ex-cons. Though Sid kept most of this away from his son, Ed managed to pick up some of the techniques.
Sid’s real problems lay underneath, hidden and silent. His cholesterol could clog the Chicago sewer system. His heart, constantly fighting to get blood to his extremities, was weaker than a newborn’s fist. He weighed in excess of three hundred pounds and he wasn’t doing a thing to alleviate the condition. He partied like there was no such thing as high blood pressure or atherosclerosis, and it was one sunny Tuesday, about ten in the morning, when it all caught up with him.
Ed could still remember it as clearly as if it had happened that morning. Sid was standing on the bar in his stocking feet holding one end of a big cloth banner that read ALCOHOLICS UNANIMOUS. Ed was poised in a similar fashion at the other end of the bar, where he had just finished banging a nail through the corner of the banner into a beam in the ceiling. He handed the hammer down to Carlito, the fat bartender, who took it and a second nail to Sid at the other end of the bar. Sid, reached down, took the hammer and nail from Carlito then stretched on tiptoes to secure the other end of the banner to the ceiling beam. It was precisely then, as he was about to strike the nail into the beam, that a shot of adrenaline was released in response to physical activity unseen by Sid’s body in twenty-seven years. Because of very low levels of potassium and magnesium in his diet, the electrical signals in Sid’s heart became all scrambled and the lower chambers of the tortured organ began to fibrillate wildly. A sharp pain shot through Sid like a lightening bolt. His eyes bulged out and his breathing stopped. He looked down the bar at his son Ed, who now appeared to be in negative. There was a blinding flash of green light seen only by Sid then he gasped his last breath.
Sid Miller had probably had dozens of small heart attacks, but he ignored the occasional numbness in the fingers of his left hand and chalked up the odd slight dizziness to the one or two white Russians he took first thing in the morning. The only doctors he ever saw were the ones who came in at night to self-medicate with alcohol. Sid’s Cabana on the Beach, like many other such establishments around the world, was a kind of suicide club.
Sid might have survived his fall from the bar that Tuesday morning if he hadn’t landed on his head on the tiled floor, if the first doctor Carlito called had not been out on a call, if they’d gotten Sid to a hospital in time... but it’s not likely. Sid’s neck was broken, a fact that Ed realized when he heard the crunching sound as he tilted his dad’s head back to give him mouth-to-mouth.
Sid’s death was a surprise to no one except Ed, who had been going along all these years as if nothing would change, as if the bright soft sunny days would come and go forever. But as he waited for the second coroner’s vehicle to arrive -- Sid’s body was too big for the first one -- Ed sat on one of the bar stools staring at his dad, now covered with the banner which he had torn down from the ceiling, and wondered for the first time what it all meant.
Ed was the new owner of Sid’s Cabana on the Beach. For months everyone asked after his Father.
“Where the hell’s good old Sid when you need him to liven things up?”
“To bad poor Sid’s not here to see this.”
There were innumerable toasts to Sid, then, slowly, in his absence, business started to drop off.
The only good thing that came out of Sid Miller’s death was that Ed re-established contact with his mom. When Ed called her to inform her of her ex-husband’s passing, she seemed surprised that he had lasted as long as he did. Ed actually sensed some vague satisfaction in her tone. Of course she wouldn’t be attending the funeral, but she did encourage Ed to visit her. He gave some lame excuse.
Later, when he got in a bit of financial trouble, she sent him the money and stepped up her campaign to get him to abandon the cabana on the beach and return to Toronto. Ed guessed correctly that it was an attempt to claw back some of the slices of joy that Sid and Ed had initially introduced into her otherwise dreary life. But so far the only thing she did retain from the twenty-two year marriage was the one hundred plus pounds she had gradually managed to pack on to her petite frame. She was fat too, and that made her resent Sid even more. He had made her that way and secretly she wished he would show up on her doorstep, crawling back in need of her compassion. But he was gone and now it was Ed who was crawling back. If only he could have kept up the mortgage payments on his own. But the cabana on the beach had really gone into a slump. He’d missed one payment and another loomed, so he called his mom and she immediately sent the bank a check to cover it. Every business went through slumps, and sometimes there wouldn’t be a soul in the place all day, but Ed was sure that things would pick up again any day.
It went on like this for who knows how long. It was impossible to keep track of time in any sort of meaningful way on the island. Nothing else really blemished Ed’s existence, except maybe for the time he was berated loudly by two middle-aged American women for wearing a thong on the beach at his weight.
Again and again Mom sent checks to the bank to cover the mortgage, usually followed by a letter to Ed telling him how beautiful Toronto was in the spring and how she’d moved to a bigger condo so he could have his own room. Ed was glad he never had to face her directly and rarely wrote back.
Now look. His plane was making its final approach to Pearson International in Toronto.
3
Home
Customs was tricky. They confiscated his bag of macadamia nuts -- very hard items to come by in Canada and expensive as hell. He thought this would be the end of it until they donned prophylactic rubber gloves and pulled back a layer of shirts to discover the two candied hams and a vacuum-sealed nut cake that he had brought along. If he’d known they were going to take these he would have eaten them instead of the skimpy meal they’d served on the plane.
--
Ed marveled at the huge floor-to-sky windows of the new terminal. A flashy monorail zipped through outside. He decided not to spring for a cab and waited along with six or so other people for the bus that would take him downtown.
He was lucky to get the front seat where he could see everything. The sun was just about to set and its light reflected and flashed off the many new buildings of the city. Things had really changed since he’d been here last. How long ago was that anyway? Twelve, thirteen years? He’d had to go to Houston once to trade his dad’s Chevy for one of those big chrome and red lacquered Italian espresso machines. Toronto was now bigger than Houston. As the bus cruised along the expressway that ridiculous tower loomed up ahead. Now it was surrounded by more construction: A big sports dome and a cluster of new condos. Didn’t look so out of place now.
Though it was only late August, Toronto was still somehow a cold place and Ed remembered immediately why he was happy to escape the blizzard conditions that would soon sweep in and turn this place into a frozen hell.
He thought back to the sweet air of the island, the shoeless days and nights, the two nubile volleyball girls he used to watch frolicking every morning on the sand court across the street from the cabana.
This was exactly what he had been doing when the portentous call came.
Carlito the bartender was busy grilling the jumbo shrimp kabobs and preparing his brilliantly spicy sweet sauce for the lunch rush. Carlito, whose name in Spanish, by the way, means “little man,” was anything but a little man. He weighed at least three-hundred-and-twenty pounds and this was why he could only work alone in the narrow space behind the bar.
Carlito picked up the phone and mouth-full mumbled “Sid’s Cabana on the Beach” then held it out to Ed.
“s’fer you Ed.” he said.
Ed came over and took the phone. “Ed Miller here.”
The voice on the other end was Spanish accented, male and official. “Mister Miller, Victor Valesquez of the Banco Central de la Republica...”
Ed brightened when he recognized the caller as the heavy-drinking Assistant Manager of his bank, or more properly, his dad’s bank.
“Hey Vic,” Ed laughed. “We never see you down here any more. What’s the matter, you gone on the wagon or something?”
“Mister Miller, I regret to inform you that the bank has no choice but to cancel your credit and call in your loan.” Victor said bluntly. He was never any good at delivering bad news, a job that fell to him with annoying regularity. It was probably one of the reasons for his excessive drinking, which he was now obviously either cutting back on or doing elsewhere.
“Come on Vic.” Ed laughed. “There’s no sense getting all tense over a little MasterCard balance...”
“It’s not MasterCard sir.”
“Sir!? Vic, it’s me, Ed. Just tell me what I have to do.” Ed was rolling his eyes at the ceiling right now but real worry was starting to creep in.
“We have issued several notices and extended your due dates twice. You haven’t returned any of my calls. We have no alternative at this point but to foreclose....”
“Oh Vic, what’s the bank going to do with a broken down old cabana on the beach anyway?”
“Sell it.” Vic said flatly. “And it’s not on the beach, it’s closer to the road...”
“Okay, look.” Ed realized that Vic needed to be spoken to in a business like manner. “I’ll get my mother to call you. I’m sure she...”
“I’ve already left many messages for your mother. She doesn’t return any of my calls either.”
“I’m askin’ you seriously now Vic, Just let me talk to her and I’ll...”
“We require you to vacate within forty-eight hours,” Vic said finally and the line went dead.
“The prick hung up on me,” Ed said to the phone, then immediately dialed his mom in Toronto.
No answer.
Ed stared out the window at the two volleyball girls for a while then tried to call Vic back. He was “too busy to take the call right now”.
Yeah, sure.
Maybe he could scare up enough to at least make a partial payment. He called his mom again. Still no answer. He glared at a trembling Carlito “The god damned bank can’t sell this broken down place.” He didn’t mean to say it out loud but he did. Even if they did try to sell it, who’d by it? Carlito had figured out what was happening and his eyes had teared up pretty heavily. Ed sat with Carlito while he downed three double whiskey sours and cried a bit more. He then took off his apron and went home for the last time.
Vic was right. It hadn’t been the first warning. There had been four of five. Ed had lost count.
Now, at 8:15 P.M. Toronto time, he was standing on the sidewalk across from Union Station on Front Street. The first thing he noticed was that there were a whole lot more people around than he remembered. This corner used to be a pretty lonely place by this time on a Tuesday night. Now there were people everywhere. Everyone seemed to be talking on cell phones.
His mom owned a small condo in the heart of the city and he wondered idly how much that must be worth by now. He wondered if she had a will. He was pretty sure he’d be mentioned in it.
In the interest of saving money Ed considered walking the ten blocks to his mom’s place. He wondered what Mom had in her fridge and decided to get a cab.
He greeted the surly cabbie with his usual “How’s it hangin’?” but got no response.
Toronto used to be a place where everyone spoke to everyone else more or less politely. As he remembered it a cabbie, happy to have the business, would always leap from behind the wheel, grab your bags and stow them in the trunk for you but this time Ed had to toss his own bags into the back seat and climb in without so much as a look from the driver.
“Seventy-five Dalhousie Street.” He said and as they pulled out he noticed another cabbie helping a fare with his bags. Maybe he just got a guy who’d had a miserable day.
“Nice evening.” Ed said in an attempt to reach out to a diminished soul, as was his way.
No response.
Two cars blasted him as the cabbie pulled right out in front of them into University Avenue and headed north then turned left onto Richmond Street.
Ed realized right away that the man was going the wrong way, but if he didn’t turn soon he’d straighten him out. Meanwhile the tip was diminishing proportionately. Along the way he saw that a whole lot had happened to the west side of town since he’d left. What used to be drab fabric wholesalers and soda-bottling factories were now modern concert halls, theaters, lots of ethnic restaurants and crowds milling about everywhere.
The cab turned north and Ed finally spoke up. “Say, isn’t Dalhousie on the east side? Ed asked.
“Construction” the cabbie muttered and turned onto Queen Street behind a streetcar and stopped immediately.
“Pain in the ass these streetcars eh?” Ed said trying to sound Canadian, but the cabbie didn’t so much as look at him in the rear view mirror.
After creeping along for five minutes Ed said “Look, it’s not far, I think I’ll walk.” He handed the guy ten bucks and got out. He headed east on foot. Toronto had turned into an American city, no doubt about it. Ed felt like an idiot. He’d paid ten bucks to be taken eight blocks further away from his destination. As he hoofed it along Queen Street he saw the cause of the delay up ahead.
Fire trucks blocked the entire street and a blaze in a shop on the north side was just coming under control. Police were keeping people back but as Ed crossed the street he noticed that the shop where the fire was raging was called “WENDY’S LARGE GALS’ BOUTIQUE.” Ed could barely make out the remains of some graffiti on what was left of the front of the store, “YOU ALL SUCK.” Onlookers seemed to be regarding the scene with some satisfaction, as though a local crack house had finally been gotten rid of. The vague thought crossed his mind that something strange was going on.
4
What was going on
A block away, the Reverend Father Allen wheeled his twelve-year-old Cadillac through the clogged traffic toward the warehouse district. It was a part of town where nightclubs had once been allowed to proliferate in a textbook example of incompetent town planning. Violent crime soon prevailed and in a gradual clampdown, the neighborhood became a twelve square block police state. One by one the clubs were forced to dissipate to the suburbs and these streets went dark once more. The area now had no identity and no one really knew what was going on behind the blank facades.
Something weighed heavily on the good Father’s mind as he sought a shortcut down a one-way street. Though he felt more comfortable in jeans and a sweatshirt, Father Allen had taken to wearing his clerical collar almost all the time now since things had started getting worse. Still, sixty-eight was no age for a dedicated man of the cloth to be playing street crusader. By now he should be delivering his message on television. Oh sure his blog on the Church of the Safe Way web site got an average of twelve hundred hits a month, but that was mostly the same hundred or so shut-ins, exchanging recipes and gossiping. He never really understood how the technology worked anyway. It was his daughter, Sara, who did all that. He believed his work was out in the street, the only work he knew, saving souls one at a time.
For a man who was fundamentally and unashamedly good, Father Allen had seen his share of hardship. He’d never really gotten over the loss four years earlier of his loving wife, Elspeth, in a freak airline accident. If it hadn’t been for his daughter Sara, Father Allen would have given up long ago. At the tender age of twenty-eight, Sara had taken on her mother’s role and convinced her father that he was meant to learn and grow from these setbacks instead of giving in to the weakness of the flesh.
God knows how many times he’d felt like giving up.
Over the years his wife had socked away enough for him to retire and live out his days waiting to be delivered home to his Lord and be reunited with her. But Father Allen’s work was far from done. More people needed him now than ever before.
Suddenly a horn blared and he realized that he’d driven, distracted, straight through a red light. He checked his rear view mirror and slowed down. A reckless driving charge was the last thing he needed right now -- especially in this neighborhood.
Finally, off the main street and down an alley to a wide mews surrounded by featureless three and four-story warehouses, Father Allen pulled his car over to the curb. Shutting off the engine and the lights, he looked slowly around, waiting for everything to settle down, making sure no one was watching. You couldn’t be too careful these days. He swung open his door and pulled himself from the car, then ever so gently pressed the door closed with his substantial right hip. Again he waited for the envelope of silence to close in.
The thirteen police officers watching him from the darkness of a disguised transport vehicle parked nearby managed to remain silent and inconspicuous.
Father Allen didn’t drive a Cadillac because it was a luxury car. He didn’t really believe in luxury. It was because General Motors was the only manufacturer willing to replace a broken driver’s seat back every year for the full length of the warranty. Of course that was in the old days when the Father was at the height of his powers and sporting a domineering three-hundred and thirty pound plus physique. Stress had taken its toll and his weight now hovered somewhere around two-ninety.
It was so quiet down here that the Father could hear the snap of each individual grain of grit under his shoes echo off the brick walls as he made his way across the street to an apparently empty warehouse.
Detective Bill Lardner, his partner Detective Ray Bailey, and the eleven uniformed cops with them could hear each of the good Father’s footfalls too. They watched as he strode up to a plain wooden door, looked up and down once more then, knocked twice, waited, then knocked three times more.
Father Allen knew the routine well. So did Detective Lardner. The police had been staking out this location for almost a month now waiting for a certain evening when there would be enough “big fish” in attendance to justify a full-scale raid. They watched as the door opened and the Father was admitted by a nervous little man in coveralls.
When everything had returned to normal in the street Lardner turned back to his men.
“Okay, we’re going in.”
Bailey rubbed his hands together, anxious to get going. This bothered Lardner about his partner. He was always chomping at the bit, ready to do his job, constantly tailgating the car in front and eager to get into physical confrontations. Lardner had once heard Bailey bragging to two patrolmen about staying single so he could get the more dangerous cases, but Lardner believed that it was more because he couldn’t find a woman who liked to talk about special weapons and tactics before, after, and possibly even during sex.
“Okay, now pay attention,” Lardner said to the men. “This is where it gets a bit tricky and I don’t want anyone getting hurt in there tonight. Don’t get caught up in the way it looks. These people may or may not be committing a crime. Chances are good they’re not.”
Lardner saw this whole episode in the city’s history as another one of those fad laws that, once the public and the politicians had gotten over it, the police could be hung out to dry for being too rough. So the important thing now was to impress the men with procedure. If they acted with care and compassion, later, when the shit hit the fan, their collective nose would be clean.
Bailey chimed in as if Lardner’s instruction needed clarification. “The point is, it’s going to take them by surprise.”
“Just go easy,” Lardner said this last phrase slowly so it would sink in. Then he said it again even more slowly.
What Lardner and his men were about to do that night in the warehouse district was the result of intense lobbying by a small group of busybodies who took it to be their business to utterly destroy any last vestige of anything fine in their quest to control the personal habits of others. They were going to raid the largest unlicensed eatery to date, and it would undoubtedly show up in the papers the next day. If they were lucky it would be buried in the back pages somewhere among the local human interest stories. In any case Lardner was playing it safe. He didn’t want any slip up that might turn this into a bigger controversy than it already was.
“This is as much for your own protection as it is for theirs,” he explained. “Things will look a whole lot worse if somebody gets hurt.” Lardner created a long pause and made the facial expression that said he was now looking each man in the eye, though, in the darkness, he couldn’t really see them in any detail and they couldn’t see him either. But the men all knew from his tone of voice that he was serious. Each man nodded an unseen “yes” back at him.
Bailey couldn’t stand waiting another second and took over with the nitty gritty, as he always liked to call it. “Okay, remember, some of these folks can be dangerous. Never position yourself between two of them when making an arrest or between one of them and a wall. And whatever you do never go down stairs ahead of them. Always behind. Keep your eyes open for this one, it’s a killer...”
Everyone but Lardner and Bailey laughed. Bailey stressed the point. “It’s not funny. I know what I’m talking about.
Lardner cut back in. He didn’t want the men taking any of this too lightly. “We gotta have nice orderly arrests, no firearms, no profanity and don’t even try to push and shove.
5
Jacque’s
Father Allen strode through the large warehouse space piled high with row upon row of crates, ahead of the man who had admitted him.
“I don’t know Father, I really don’t know.” The man yammered. “We do try to keep track of everyone but it just simply isn’t possible to....”
“Oh come on Rick!” Father Allen cut him off. “How could you miss him? He’s the biggest spender in the place!”
Father Allen reached up and swung open a panel hidden in blank wall and stepped into Jacque’s midnight eatery. Virtually unknown and secreted in the back of the dull, dusty, business-as-usual warehouse, Jacque’s was the hidden epitome of elegance and good taste: the Brahms concerto seeping gently into the large room, the fanciful rococo decor, the fabulous and exotic dishes being swept in from an efficient kitchen by a dedicated crew of thin but capable waiters... There was everything from Venison Steak St. Hubert to Soft-shelled Crabs Amandine, Pakistani Pigeon and Pilaf to Viennese Noodle Pudding. No ordinary lasagna here. Tonight Jacque’s chefs were serving Cannelloni a la Nerone, a mouthwatering handmade pasta stuffed with a secret mixture of chicken, prosciutto and parmesan, smothered in a rich sauce and broiled to perfection.
Jacque’s used to be legitimate and one of the trendier eateries close to the theater district, but his establishment had been slowly driven into the darkness of back streets by the constant incremental stiffening of regulations restricting the preparation and vending of food products, regulations most of the other restaurateurs struggled to follow for fear of losing their licenses and livelihoods.
But Jacque was an artiste, an epicurean genius who believed that the right to create great art transcended all boundaries and restrictions. That is why he saw no infraction in importing, for example, Italian white winter truffles, through the black market if necessary, to please patrons as discerning as himself. Many of his most ardent followers were the wealthy and politically well connected cognoscenti who believed -- no, knew -- that without high art and culture a society shrivels and dies. Its human spirit dries up from within and eventually vanishes in the blind, dispassionate vacuum of ignorance.
The battle raged courageously in the chambers of city hall, the legislative bodies and, from time to time, in the Supreme Court. Picket lines appeared in front of Jacque’s thirty-eight table restaurant on King Street. In the old days one had to make reservations three weeks in advance. But Jacque’s thin customers responded to the persecution by abandoning him almost immediately.
Finally the phones fell silent. He had to remove tables. Soon his clientele consisted solely of “that all too visible minority” as one journalist put it with impunity, and in no time Jacque’s became known as a hangout for the well to do obese. After eight months, beset by a constant harassment of health, building and safety inspectors, representatives of the Provincial and Federal Revenue Agencies and CSIS, the CIA of Canada, Jacque was just about worn down to the ground.
Finally, it was a letter from the CCLA, the Canadian version of the ACLU, inquiring into allegations of prejudice in his hiring practices that made Jacque realize no one was on his side, no one that is but his most loyal customers, many of whom were also members of the flock of Father Allen’s Church of the Safe Way.
As for the CCLA and the ACLU too for that matter, many of their members were overweight and they were a long way from settling the matter within their own ranks. The ACLU had recently defended an airline cabin attendant in a U.S. court action to get her job back after the airline claimed she was too heavy for the job. But they had also supported the removal of three severely obese children from an Oxnard family in support of the social workers who had charged the parents with child abuse. They had, in other words come down squarely on both sides of the issue.
Eventually the forces of mediocrity won out and, rather than compromise his virtuosity, Jacque simply closed his doors. It was a hollow triumph for the new conservatism that was sweeping the city. Jacque’s simply went underground.
Jacque’s wealthier lifelong patrons financed the secret warehouse eatery and its security arrangements. Everything was done with the utmost discretion, but the police knew about the place from the beginning, and though they had been regularly closing down questionable food retailers all over town, tonight was to be their first search and seizure foray into the high-end underworld trade in unlicensed, illicit and allegedly unsafe foodstuffs.
Father Allen scanned the crowded room. An effeminate maître d’ scurried over wringing his hands with and speaking with mixed emotions in a fake French accent. “Why Father Allen... what a surprise! What brings you to our modest establishment this fine evening?”
Ignoring him, Father Allen spotted one particularly rowdy table in the corner and waded through the sea of corpulent clientele to where the outsized Alderman Adams was enthusiastically celebrating his fifty-sixth birthday.
The alderman was genuinely pleased to see him. “Father Allen! Sit down.” He pulled an unused chair from the table behind him. “You’re just in time to help us wish me a happy...”
Father Allen cut him off, “Ken, you of all people should know better... there could be undercover agents in here right now writing down names... taking photographs!”
Alderman Adams remained jovial. “Hogwash! Nobody knows about this place. Besides,” he laughed to the others, “it’s not a felony to celebrate your birthday... not yet anyway.”
Father Allen waved an arm at the room. “All of this is against the law! Haven’t you been reading the papers?”
Alderman Adams was serious now, “What the hell’s a person to do Father, give up their livelihood just because some freaky little fitness fanatics decide everyone should weigh less than one-ten?” I’m sick of it for Christ’s sake!”
“Don’t drag Him into it.” Father Allen countered. “This isn’t any of His doing. We created this situation all by ourselves.”
“Sorry...” The Alderman took a sip of wine. “But be reasonable. How can anyone in their right mind honestly believe that eating two desserts is substance abuse?”
The Father grasped the Alderman’s shoulder scrunching the corner of his suit jacket into his fist. “I’m telling you Ken, this is...”
Suddenly the Alderman was less than amused. “Come on Father, calm down, will you? I’m a city official. They can’t do anything to me.” Alderman Adams yanked himself free, patted down his crumpled shoulder pad and poured Father Allen a glass of wine.
“Here, this is a nice full-bodied Chardonnay which, believe it or not, goes beautifully with the roast leg of veal. And to finish there’s Grand Marnier pots de crème that the waiters say are too rich for one person to eat. Imagine. You should see the fabulous butter cream cake they have on the pastry cart it’s all....”
“Kenneth!” Father Allen said emphatically.
“What?” Alderman Adams had grabbed a plate and was now slicing a thick piece of veal roast for the Father.
Father Allen placed a hand on his arm stopping him. “Is any of your family here with you?”
“No.”
“Good, you and your friends have to get out of here before...”
But before Father Allen could finish his plea, the now no-longer-secret panel banged open and Lardner, Bailey and the squad of cops burst in.
Bailey held a loudhailer to his mouth. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is a raid.” He pointed to a wall. “No one is in any danger. Put down your food and line up in an orderly fashion on that side of the room with your identification ready.”
The merriment quickly gave way to screams of horror and panic. Some tried to escape. Others tried to hide but the police seemed to be everywhere. Some of Jacque’s customers continued to stuff food into their mouths as they were rounded up and led out of the room. The police weren’t looking for Jacque, by the way. He was already in custody, having been arrested several weeks earlier for income tax fraud. The eatery was now run by his two sons, who never showed their faces in the place for fear of becoming caught up in exactly the sort of thing that was now taking place.
As everyone at the Alderman’s table stood up, Father Allen finally sat down and buried his face in his hands. This was pretty well going to do it. With the “bulk” of his congregation under arrest and the rest afraid to attend services, what was left?.
Detective Bailey saw the Father sitting alone at the table and came over. “Come on, move it!” he barked.
Lardner, constantly on the alert for anything that could be blown out of proportion in the media, stepped in with a hand on Bailey’s shoulder. “Uh Father, we don’t want to take you in.” Though Lardner wasn’t very religious, nothing short of a smoking gun could make him arrest a man of the cloth. “I think you’d better be leaving now.”
Father Allen pulled himself slowly to his feet. His eyes met Lardner’s. For an instant the two men, though on opposing sides of the issue, shared an affinity, some compassion, some understanding of the “big” picture. Father Allen, adept at seeing into people’s souls, knew this man meant him and his people no harm.
“You’re just going to let him go?” Bailey protested.
“He just came in here,” Lardner said, “he’s only trying to help.” Bailey grimaced then moved off to attend to the growing melee.
Lardner cast Father Allen an abstract but reassuring nod. Father Allen knew there was nothing he could do at this point. He turned and shuffled towards the door in clerical immunity and left the place.
By the time the alleged felons had all been herded out into the street and formed into groups ready to board approaching paddy wagons, they had more or less resigned themselves to the situation. All, that is, except for Alderman Adams who continued to rant at the indifferent cops about his rights as an elected official.
“This is an absolute outrage!” he bellowed. “You haven’t the slightest idea how much trouble you will be in when your superiors learn who I am! Who the hell’s in charge here anyway?”
His question was not dignified with a reply. Lardner and Bailey supervised from a distance. “Good.” Lardner looked up and down the street, made a mental note, “No press around.”
They didn’t manage to get any of the staff. It wasn’t until more than half an hour after the last cop had left the underground eatery, the doors had been nailed shut and the street outside Jacque’s was quiet once more, that the crew of employees emerged naked, stuttering and shivering from the very back of the deep freeze locker at the back of the kitchen. The locker had been searched but the cops could not endure the frigid environment. In their quick survey they couldn’t make anything out in the half-light. They’d failed to notice the little piles of white clothing here and there on the floor or the naked chefs, sous chefs and waiters hanging camouflaged in their state of nature among the huge sides of meat. At one point one of the cops swung the head waiter aside in order to shine his flashlight between him and a huge side of veal. His light fell on the maître d’ who just barely managed to suppress a sneeze. Luck was with him. He was taken for contraband and left swaying in that artificial winter.
Without a word to each other the staff now put on their coats and left to go their separate ways via a small window on the second floor at the other end of the building, down the fire escape to disappear into the night.
6
The Land of the Free
and
The Home of the Brave
The dominant local proponent of the local war on obesity was forty-something Ruth Bracket. Bracket, a product of an ambitious God-fearing, churchgoing, eastern right-wing dysfunctional family, had zoomed through college before she was twenty-six.
At fourteen she wrote in her diary, “I will ride my Harley Davidson every day to law school and when I get married, he will ride on the back behind me.” She wanted to be a lawyer but her father, Army General Sam Bracket, for social reasons of his own, paid a fortune to put her, his only child, through Harvard Business school. Sam Bracket, one of the many Canadians who enlisted in the US Army in the sixties, knew that real war was waged in the legislature and the stock market, not on the battlefield. An out and out shooting conflict was something that happened when the people who made the tough decisions in finance and government ran out of options or craved the profit of war. And, one afternoon along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, when the vehicle in front of him was hit by a Viet Cong mortar and his best friend’s head landed on his hood, he found God. That was why Ruth finally gave in to the constant harassment and took Theology as her second at Harvard. It was the very last time she ever did anything she was told to do.
Ruth Bracket didn’t realize that her basic feeling towards men was contempt until she started hobnobbing with young male publishers, lawyers, movie studio executives and physicians -- then old ones. She never understood how so many men who could pull in six and seven figure salaries could be such idiots. Consequently she never had a single authentic meaningful relationship. Her longest affair lasted a mere eighty-six hours and seventeen minutes and her only serious marriage proposal had been from another woman. The whole notion of that made her dizzy and ill.
Her whole attitude toward romantic relationships with men was summed up and evident in one small tableaux obscured from the world in her medicine cabinet at her penthouse condo. It was a double slotted holder for her removable Braun Tooth Care brush heads. One of the slots had a label from an office label maker that read “MINE”. The label on the other slot read “HIS”. It was empty.
Confusion was something Bracket could not tolerate. She was a decision maker. A doer. A mover and shaker. Her discontent with the world first manifested itself when she authored two self-help books. The first, “Working Your Way Up In The Sexist Workplace” sold six hundred and eleven copies worldwide. The second, a bitter review of her first experience in the publishing business and a scathing critique on the inadequacies of the modern American male titled “Don’t Park It Here Buster” became a big hit with the British gay and lesbian community for some reason, but flopped otherwise.
Rather than admit any kind of defeat, she decided to see if she could turn a profit working directly with the root problems of society. She read the debates over food safety and labeling and the growing problem of childhood obesity. She subscribed to the more respectable fitness and nutrition magazines. She even joined Jenny Craig, though her own weight never topped out at more than one hundred and nineteen.
She registered a corporation and named it Rightweigh Inc. With a staff of three, she cranked out two moderately popular guides to fitness then opened a fairly successful weight-loss clinic in the business district.
Most people don’t know what the Freudian term anal-retentive actually means. When a child is praised by doting parents each and every time they successfully produce a healthy bowel movement, they often hold back when it’s time to go in order to extend that attention -- hence the term. They are exercising control over the parent. Many of these children grow up to be performance-oriented adults who seek to control others. Deadly serious, passive-aggressive and compulsively organized, Ruth Bracket was referred to by those who got to know her as “a real piece of work.”
Her motives were pure -- at least as pure as the motives of an ambitious, tough, businesswoman could be. Every attempt to solve the obesity problem had failed and she really did want to help these disadvantaged people. Besides, If Ruth could come up with a workable solution to this crippling and financially devastating social problem, the notoriety and acclaim would stream in endlessly.
“The obese are unhappy people,” she would say with conviction, though it wasn’t actually true. “They know it, we know it. Of course society, in its typical fashion, is content to let the suffering suffer. But they don’t want to go on that way and society can’t afford to let them go on that way! We’re going to fix it.”
She had “bitten off” quite a bit with this quest. It was impossible to get overweight people to stick to diet and exercise programs, surgery was expensive and had all sorts of attendant complications, drugs were useless and dangerous. So intractable was the problem that Bracket quickly came to abhor the sight of them. It seemed that everywhere you went, there they were. Taking up valuable space. They were in the streets. They were on the beaches. They were in the restaurants -- not just the fast food restaurants but all of them. They were at and in the movies.
“High blood pressure, coronary and kidney disease, high cholesterol, stroke and diabetes are all the results of obesity” she said to a gathering of politicians, influential medical practitioners and assorted dignitaries in the Essex Ballroom of the Sheraton Center Hotel. They were there to discuss proposals as to how funds handed down from the federal government were to be allocated and how certain programs should be budgeted.
“Death from certain cancers: colon, prostate, breast and uterine. Fourteen percent among men and twenty percent among women -- all mainly due to this epidemic of obesity.”
From the moment she took her place at the podium everyone had stopped eating. Forkfuls of roast beef au jus and overcooked Yorkshire pudding hovered motionless between plate and mouth as she drove her point home.
“These diseases are costing the taxpayer billions. Billions that can be spent on higher pay for medical practitioners, the teachers of our children, better paid police forces, highways, bridges...”
She talked about how cheaply and easily this problem could be solved, prevented with education, eradicated with compassionate care and sensible, realistic therapies. She sold them a utopia of budget-saving fitness and got a standing ovation for her efforts. Even the corpulent, the big boned and the metabolism-impaired among them got to their feet in applause, never realizing exactly what it all meant.
A week later, she had a similar get-together at the same hotel in the same room with leaders of industry, only this time, after laying out her plan, she proposed how the government might, in these difficult financial times, institute tax shelters and guarantee loans to get it all under way. Another thunderous ovation.
Bracket was good at tailoring her act to any audience. She told a gathering of retail entrepreneurs that supermarket aisles had to be as wide as they were because of “them”. “If we could make the aisles narrower we could add more shelves. I don’t think I have to remind any of you that manufacturers and distributors pay a hefty premium for that shelf space.”
At a gathering of well known ecologists and industry executives she shifted her pitch stating flatly, “According to an authority no less than the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the production and transport of the foods in our diets produces more carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and other greenhouse gases than any other industry. A quarter pounder produces as much greenhouse gas in the atmosphere as driving a three-thousand pound car ten miles. It costs us ten pounds of plant protein to produce one pound of beef. Not only that but that same pound of beef produces almost fifteen pounds of Co2 -- thirty-six times that of a pound of asparagus.”
When speaking to groups of concerned citizenry she would call for an end to the food industry greed that “is poisoning you and your children”.
To woman’s groups she would say “A man’s necktie is a clear wardrobe signal that he has never once leaned over to clean a toilet, though the tie clip may be the suggestion that they are thinking about it,” and she would revel in the peals of laughter. “It is left to us, the women, to clean up this toilet of society that men have created!”
Unable to resist, she once called in to a TV talk show that was discussing whether sustained weight loss was really healthy. “Name one fat person who has any credibility,” she said challenging the three large panel members, one of whom, by coincidence was Father Allen. The best they could come up with on the spot was Orson Welles.
“Who ate and drank himself to death,” she pointed out. “Someone living.”
“Oprah Winfrey used to be quite big” a National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) member said.
“No!” Bracket said flatly. “That person no longer exists. She gained her credibility back by becoming who she is now. If it was right for her to be overweight why did she change it?” and with that she hung up.
A murmur went through the audience after which Father Allen said “People lose weight as a personal decision. It is something they want to do. It’s their private business and not open for debate. If you love and respect yourself that’s all that matters. If you love and respect others that helps.” He was right of course but throughout the remainder of the show audience members continued to call out names of other large people of celebrity both living and dead in response to Bracket’s provocation: “Oscar Wilde!” a man at the back called out.
“William Howard Taft!” a woman exclaimed.
“Sidney Greenstreet and Serge Diaghilev!” another woman added.
“Robert Morley”
“Empress Eugenie”
“Raymond Burr.”
“John Candy”
“S. Weir Mitchell”
Whether you agreed with her or not, most of what Ruth Bracket said made sense. The perception was that obesity unnecessarily burdened the public health-care system and it had to be dealt with.
S. Weir Mitchell, by the way, was a nineteenth century neurologist who believed that “production of a large number of fat cells was crucial to a well-balanced personality and that thin people, lacking a sufficient number of such cells, were invariably querulous and discontented. In a way he too was right.
And Bracket was putting her money where her mouth was. Well, not her money exactly. She had approached a wealthy real estate entrepreneur who owned a virtually useless large property on the outskirts of the city. The plan was for him to quietly deposit, interest free, one-point-five million dollars into her corporate account where it would sit, untouched until she had raised the funds to take the land off his hands. The one-point-five million was to assure potential investors that they were not the first ones in on the project. She would hand the money back along with a sizable down-payment on the land and the deal would be done. When he demanded a five percent gross commission on the proceeds of her proposed operation, she showed him a map of the city with four alternative locations marked with red stickers. He abandoned the commission and went for her proposal.
In a few months, two large buildings were under construction, the entire acreage was enclosed in high wire mesh fencing and ornate steel gates were put up at the entrance. A large golden sign informed everyone that they were “WELCOME TO RIGHTWEIGH.” Beneath that: “Rightweigh-Health.com”.
As soon as the new food-labeling laws were in force, and once restaurant portion-control legislation was on the way, she had a meeting with local legislators and the mayor at City Hall. In a direct, no-nonsense manner she proposed that clogged court dockets could be cleared substantially by offering, at the discretion of the court, a plea option in place of a tough prison sentence: a term of specified weight loss to be carried out at her facility, Rightweigh.
She painted the picture for them: “It costs the government at least thirty thousand dollars to process and incarcerate an individual for ninety days on a misdemeanor conviction. When they come out, nothing has changed. In fact all we have done is institutionalize them with hardened offenders where they learn how to be better criminals. After completing their sentences at Rightweigh they will have” and she counted the points off on her fingers, “one, paid their debt to society, two, been free of negative influences and three, and most important, they will have lost weight. They would subsequently be less of a burden on an already overtaxed medical system and far less prone to recidivism. Gentlemen, it’s win/win/win all around. And just to put the icing on the cake, so to speak,” she added, “I wouldn’t be surprised if you could get financial support from the federal government.”
She knew that both men fancied themselves as fitness enthusiasts. They both agreed on the spot to finance a pilot project in which twenty inmates would be transferred from one of the lower courts to Rightweigh.
The demonstration of the process went perfectly and pretty soon a specific courtroom and a judge experienced in unusual, socially-minded sentencing was seeing dozens of cases a week.
The original concept for Ruth Bracket’s government-financed program came to her when she happened to see an article in one of the U.S. tabloids. Though she didn’t read these rags, they couldn’t be avoided at the supermarket checkout, a particular place and activity she despised.
The story was about a couple of large Medford Oregon women who were making a small fortune locally with their recipe for elderberry pie. They wanted to expand their operation into the lucrative California market so they attempted to take three dozen of them to the California Sate Fair in Sacramento. But they were apprehended at the state border and their wares were seized by officers of the fruit quarantine checkpoint. Now technically, this facility was only supposed to be protecting commercial California farming from Mediterranean fruit fly infestation, something that did not really apply when the fruit was baked. But, as usual, these bored little Hitlers, sitting all day out on the highway, poking through people’s personal belongings for fresh fruit, became bloated with power. At one point they were even confiscating children’s fruit flavored chewing gum. It was a small but ominous portent of just how far things could go.
The story piqued Bracket’s imagination with visions of the new U.S. health-care system desperately trying to bring down costs by preventing health complications rather than treating them later at a more advanced stage. Though it may have been a long way off in the U.S., Bracket knew there could be very lucrative U.S. government contracts on the horizon. She wanted to be in place as the primary operation equipped to implement the changes when the time came in the lower forty-eight.
To the Americans, the idea of socializing anything was abhorrent and solutions to the question of what to actually do about an obese society were still far off. But it would be just long enough for Bracket to get things set up.
She could make an absolute killing. And it would be no modest start for her. At first she looked at New York State. Not Buffalo, Buffalo was broke. She considered Albany, the seat of state government but Albany was too small. She’d already talked to and made friends with the Governor of the state and the Mayor of New York City and though her head US offices would be in the Trump Tower in Manhattan, she considered a property in a rundown section of Queens for the main detention and rehab facility.